Can someone make a Web GL plugin to run Starcraft in the browser?
Multiplayer could then include countless people, and Starcraft community could be easier to support, etc?
What would it take to run Starcraft in a modern web browser?
See:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGL_API
None.
Would be pretty awesome, but being that StarCraft is closed source we would have to reverse engineer all of StarCraft and write an equivalent JavaScript version of the code.
Or, in theory though I can't think of why it would be impossible to write something similar to WINE for JS, perhaps in WebASM. The client side would read in the StarCraft binary and perform a JIT compilation to run it locally, e.g. intercepting DDraw calls to WebGL as you mention.
It would take a lot of effort.
None.
Wow, if an open source Brood War project pans out then yeah a WebGL port shouldn't be too far off from being within practical reach. Like at all.
None.
SDE, BWAPI owner, hacker.
But it's already been done. You can watch replays in your web browser. You can go to
http://www.openbw.com/sscait-listings/ to watch some AI vs AI replays. Or just go to
http://www.openbw.com/replay-viewer/ and select your own replay.
Good lord, how in the world did they recreate all the quirky path finding bugs? Are they reverse engineering the whole thing? O_o
None.